biftec

August 17, 2012 9:09 pm Or, you know, Journalism consists of something other than making shit up based on what some guy says on twitter.

June 14, 2012 2:21 pm I'll defend Morrison. Between Kane and Finger and Morrison, many, many people wrote Batman comics. The circumstances surrounded Finger's treatment by DC and Kane are outrageous, but Moore's situation isn't completely analogous. Neither Finger or Kane ever said they didn't want anyone else to write Batman. Their comics were serial stories, not a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. hundreds of creators since have offered their own interpretations, their own mythoi. I don't think the claim that creators who work on company-owned properties are sell-outs or hypocrites is valid. But In watchmen, we have a company trying to squeeze money out of a twenty-five year old story against the wishes of its primary authors, who insist that the work stands on its own merits, and who have been locked in a battle for control of the story for decades. I think those circumstances are qualitatively different than Morrison writing batman or even writing Superman, where the ownership issues have been much more charged.

June 14, 2012 1:49 pm Thanks for the lesson in moral relativism. If my rhetoric is overblown, i'll apologize but I don't think the slaughter of protesters in Syria or the racialized division of labor in contemporary capitalism have much to do with whether or not DC should be publishing these comics. Your fetishization of the contract as the arbiter of what is just/right seems to me symptomatic of rather than any kind of solution to the issue, which is how comics should value creative labor and creative control. I think those are important questions, questions about work and power, normative questions rather than legal ones. I do not think Alan Moore is some amazingly wonderful unreproachable person - some of his own work has really bad race and gender politics and his relationships with his artists are pretty tragic and incomprehensible. But he is right that this is crap.

June 14, 2012 8:07 am I don't really accept the argument that these books don't affect the source material - they do. More troubling is the way they shamelessly rip it - the excerpts from Under the Hood in last week's minutemen issue, for instance. The problem with the lovecraft analogy is the difference between homage and crass exploitation. I am fine with the former. Had more comics of the eighties and nineties taken the good lessons watchmen offered (complex intertextuality, careful deconstruction of the superhero as fascist myth, etc) instead of taking the blood and sex as an invitation to "go dark" in the stupidest of possible ways (a fault which can be attributed to several of the creators DC has now inexplicably rehired on several of its flagship books) then comics might be in a better place. But this isn't homage. This is DC rubbing its dubious copyright ownership in the face of Watchmen's creators and trying to pretend it's honoring them. H.P. Lovecraft died in 1937 (and was a pretty awful racist.) Alan Moore lives in Northampton, right now, and doesn't like being screwed over and has said many times in no uncertain terms that he thinks these books are an abomination. Maybe comics fans -and creators- have a responsibility to Moore to take his objections seriously - moreso, I'd argue, than we do to buy a shitty comic to support a retailer at the creator's expense. (I buy a lot of comics. I feel no need to buy this one. I think there is an ethical imperative to read a book if you're going to critique it. I don't think there's any similar imperative to spend money on it, especially in circumstances like this.) Anyway, not only does BW have no reason to exist, judging by the quality of these two issues, it has every reason not to exist.

June 14, 2012 12:26 am Had this not been a watchmen prequel, I probably would have bought it. I like Conner's art. I didn't buy this comic because I think it's ethically abhorrent. That's where I'm coming from, and I don't really think Jr. Wormwood's retort actually speaks to why this is or is not a fucked-up comic on artistic and/or ethical grounds. This is a badly written comic with no reason to exist other than DC trying to cash in on its failure to pacify Alan Moore. I find particular irony in Jim Lee's role given that he led a creator-owned revolt two decades ago and owes Moore a great deal for reviving his own uninspired creator-owned properties in WIldC.A.T.S.

June 13, 2012 11:42 pm I read, but did not purchase this book. Like last week's minutemen comic I found it I'll-conceived, poorly written, mawkish, and blatantly derivative. The writing is cliched, banal, and unoriginal. The art is nice, but calling it lipstick on a pig would do a disservice to pigs. Let me be clear - this comic fails on its own merits - or lack thereof. These would be bad comics even if there were no controversy, even if the creators were not making a few quick bucks on DC's grotesque act of creative necrophilia. But they are, and we should have the respect for ourselves and for comic creators to just stop buying this shit. Shame on Cooke and Conner, shame on Jim Lee and his awful softcore variant covers. Shame on the Geoff Johns era of comic book necrophilia, shame on DC, and shame on ifanboy for riding the gravy train with that abomination of a banner ad.

December 3, 2010 1:23 pm Batman and robin 13. Easily.

August 2, 2010 3:22 pm Hell's Kitchen is Clinton, not Clinton Hill.  Clinton Hill is a neighborhood in central Brooklyn, just west of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

June 30, 2010 10:38 am I'm guessing Bendis?

October 11, 2009 1:27 pm Gabriel Ba, I'm gonna let you finish, but Frank Quitely had some of the best pencils of all time! Also, Y #60 wins and ex machina 40 not even nominated? Brian K Vaughn was robbed! By Brian K Vaughn!!!1!!!